Heavy Rain’s David Cage Goes Beyond Typical Game Stories

How could that be? I think. Shouldn’t it be easy to nail it down? Is it a shooter? An RPG? A mascot platformer?

“Heavy Rain was really close to a dark thriller, like Se7en,” he says. “Beyond is different in terms of tone.”

Duh. Sitting in a small, crowded Los Angeles Convention Center meeting room set up like a tiny theater, I now have to mentally reprimand myself. Of course David Cage doesn’t mean gameplay when he says “genre”; he means story. That’s where he wants videogames to improve.

At Electronic Entertainment Expo last week, announcements of brand-new games were thin on the ground. This made Sony’s Beyond: Two Souls stand out even more. It’s the anticipated followup to Heavy Rain, the PlayStation 3 game that blended a remarkably strong mystery narrative with amazing facial capture and simplified gameplay designs. Beyond is an exploration of death and the afterlife in which you play a woman named Jodie Holmes (played by actress Ellen Page) and a spirit named Aiden, who has been tied to her for her entire life. Cage presented Beyond to groups of media in this makeshift theater off of the E3 show floor.

“I try not to do traditional games,” he said to another group later in the day. “Look at the show floor — there’s no need for another of those.”

Heavy Rain followed the intertwining stories of an ensemble cast played by relatively unknown actors. For Beyond’s story, which will be tightly focused on a single main character over the course of her life, Cage wanted someone of exceptional talent.

“I can tell you as a director, no one else could have done it.”

— David Cage

“I can tell you as a director, no one else could have done it,” Cage said. “She was a fantastic actress…. In a game where the story relies entirely on one person, you need quite an accomplished actress, capable of being a young teenager who is angry at the world or an adult, having lived what she lived.”

Cage sent the script for Beyond to Page’s agent, attempting to sell her on the idea while managing her expectations. “We were brutally honest,” he said. “This is going to be a very long shooting, similar to a movie…. It requires you to learn by heart hundreds of pages of dialogue. This is going to be exhausting…. Don’t think, this is a just a videogame, it’s okay to be bad.”

Cage and Page met in a bar prior to last year’s E3. “When I saw her for the first time, it was a very strange experience for a writer,” he said. “Like having your character appear in front of you. It’s not Ellen Page, it’s Jodie Holmes.”

In Beyond, the player follows Jodie’s life for 15 years, from childhood to her early twenties. We see how the relationship between Jodie and the unexplained spirit Aiden evolves over time.

“She calls him Aiden and doesn’t know why,” Cage says. “It’s just a name that came to her…. It’s not a pet or a power. It doesn’t obey. It’s a character with a personality all its own,” he says, given to violence and jealousy.

At the Sony press conference, we saw a demo that began with Jodie Holmes being questioned by what looked like a small-town sheriff. (Truth be told, he looked a lot like Darrell Sheets from Storage Wars, but Cage said he was in fact played by the same actor who portrayed sleazy club owner “Paco” in Heavy Rain.)

The sheriff’s attempts to get Jodie to talk to him are unsuccessful, and a SWAT team soon shows up to apprehend Jodie for reasons unknown. But Aiden’s powers turn out to be more than even a squad of highly trained cops can handle, and the pair of them leave the town in ruins.

The story of Heavy Rain can change dramatically due to a player’s choices. At the behind-closed-doors presentation in the mini-theater the next day, we saw what appeared to be the sequence leading up to Jodie being caught by the sheriff — although Cage was careful not to confirm this.

We begin this demo with Jodie, at 24 years of age, sleeping on a train. The Quantic Dream developer giving the demo begins by controlling Aiden, the spirit. The little-used motion functionality of the PlayStation3 controller is used to move him around the train car, and the two analog sticks are used to interact — two small glowing balls of energy appear on the screen, and you can pull them back and snap them at things, like a slingshot, with the sticks. Aiden is always tied to Jodie — if you try to move too far, the screen will go grey and blurry.

Aiden can bother other passengers, knocking over someone’s cup of coffee, making someone’s magazine fly away. Aiden wakes up Jodie. You can clearly read Ellen Page’s facial expressions; this one is exasperated. She just wants to sleep. But the train makes an unexpected stop — law enforcement is going to board the train. Aiden floats outside the train to see the cops standing at the tiny station. A police dog barks and starts at the camera. “If you get close to animals, they can feel your presence,” Cage says.

The police spot Jodie on the train. Now the player is controlling her. Running to the bathroom, we get the familiar Heavy Rain gameplay — icons appear all around the screen, the buttons that we need to press to interact with objects in the world. Jodie climbs onto the toilet and tries to open the emergency exit on the ceiling. She can’t. At this point, the player can help as Aiden by using the analog sticks to blow the hatch.

What you capture is a performance. You capture a moment.

Jodie climbs on top of the train and a rain-soaked action sequence ensues, where she and Aiden fight the cops. She finally jumps from the train, and Aiden puts a shield around her body to protect her. The next sequence has her running, scrambling through the forest, up and down muddy hills and around trees trying to get away. The Heavy Rain-style series of sequential button presses come into play here, where you play Twister with your fingers trying to hold down several buttons to get the onscreen character to do something precise. The dogs catch up first, and she fights them off with a stick. She climbs up a rock face and hides.

She sees more police, but they haven’t spotted her yet. “She moves in a different way because she’s trying to stay unseen,” Cage says. “We shot many different ways of walking. There are 20 different loops playing at the same time and we blend them together,” he says in a demo late that day. “She moves differently on slopes, she touches walls and trees when she’s close to them.”

Aiden can see characters’ auras; an orange one means that he can possess that character. He takes control of a police officer, and the player walks him to a car and gets in it to create a diversion by slamming the car into the guardrail. In the confusion, Jodie steals a motorcycle and rides off. She blasts through the waiting SWAT team with Aiden’s shield power.

“They’re ready to do anything to capture her,” says Cage. “They know how special she is.”

The next five minutes involve the player using Aiden’s powers to kill every last SWAT team member in the town square while Jodie takes cover. He punches a car and smashes the lights. He possesses a sniper and uses him to take out three other cops before someone puts a bullet in his head and Aiden is thrown out. He possesses another soldier and throws a grenade into the gas station; it goes up in a giant orange fireball. He smashes the clock tower, collapsing the building. He possesses a helicopter pilot and flies the chopper straight into the ground.

Surveying the wreckage, Jodie stands over the prone body of the only surviving officer.

“Tell them to leave me the fuck alone, because next time, I’ll kill everyone,” she says.

Eliciting this kind of intense performance from the actors requires much more complex technology, Cage says. It’s not just facial capture or motion capture — it’s everything, all at once. Quantic Dream will put six or seven actors on a stage, all rigged up so that everything gets turned into data — their facial expressions, their voices, their body movements and especially the way they react to each other.

“What you capture is a performance,” Cage says. “You capture a moment.”

Beyond is thus a big-budget blockbuster of a project, with around 170 people working on it. But it’s a very personal project for Cage — it’s a rumination on the nature of death, something he has been thinking about since the recent loss of his grandmother, to whom he was very close.

“It made me think about what was on the other side,” he said. “I’m not happy with what religions have to say about it, so I made up my own story.”